Tor.com, the new website for Tor Books, has launched officially. And they’re offering up for free download the bunches of books that they were giving away to newsletter subscribers in their run-up to launch.

Among the books you can grab in DRM-free formats: Old Man’s War, Spin, Farthing, Crystal Rain, and much more. Plus a zillion gorgeous wallpapers from cover art.

In any case, it does seem like we are inching ever closer to Asimov’s psychohistory. Given enough data, why wouldn’t we be able to build predictive algorithms for large-scale human populations and social trends?

In the wake of Little Brothercoming out, John Scalzi has written a post about Why YA fiction. As regular blog readers know, I’ve been banging this drum for quite a while, citing folks like Scott Westerfeld and Tamora Pierce as authors that shouldn’t be neglected just because their books get shelved elsewhere in the store.

I have a friend with access to BookScan, which tracks book sales through stores and retail outlets, who at my request checked the aggregate bestseller list sales of adult fantasy and science fiction against the sale of YA fantasy and SF. Without mentioning specific numbers or titles, my friend says that last week, the top 50 YA SF/F bestsellers outsold the top 100 adult SF/F bestsellers (adult SF and F are separate lists) by two to one. So 50 YA titles are selling twice as much as 100 adult SF/F titles. The bestselling YA fantasy book last week (not a Harry Potter book) outsold the bestselling adult fantasy book by nearly four to one; the bestselling YA science fiction title sold three copies for every two copies of the chart-topping adult SF title.

And of course, in a year that has taken people like Lloyd Alexander and Madeleine L’Engle from us, don’t forget the favorite writers who are still with us. Charles de Lint is writing good juvies lately: Dingo most recently, and The Blue Girl before that. Susan Cooper, whose stunning The Dark Is Rising sequence was recently filmed to mixed results, is still writing, and I just read Victory which was quite good, and King of Shadows which was fantastic.

But I’ve been lucky enough to have read it at various stages of development over the last year. So I don’t need a copy. Connections have their privileges!

And the bottom line is, go buy Little Brotherwhen it goes on sale in twelve days. It’s aimed at teens. Don’t let that stop you. It’s not a space opera, a military SF novel, not a Singularity sort of thing, and there are no elves. Don’t let that stop you either. Because it’s urgent, and real, and you will learn something from it.

It’s a book about a kid whose town (San Francisco) gets attacked by terrorists, and who finds it then slipping into a sort of Homeland Security nightmare. A kid who fights back with the tech he has to hand — videogame consoles and ARGs and friend networks. And also a lot of guts.

It’s a story not only about paranoia and freedom, but also about security and insecurity. The hacks described are real; there’s an afterword with real-world resources.

I am looking forward to reading it again, between proper covers instead of on loose sheets of paper.

I’ve read 3 of the 5, have a fourth but haven’t opened it the cover yet, and better get cracking on the ones I haven’t, I suppose! Particularly glad to see Halting State on the list, for the relevance to this blog — way to go, Charlie! And Scalzi will feel left out if I don’t congratulate him personally too.

For me, Arthur C. Clarke was never defined by hard science; he was defined by the unknowable. Whatever lay on the other side of the monolith. The agenda of the aliens in Childhood’s End. And of course, what was for me his most resonant work, Rendezvous with Rama. These are not stories that offer understanding — they offer, instead, mysteries a bit too big to fit into one book, one story.

Sure, he may have invented the communications satellite, but what he may be best remembered for in the end is an aphorism: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. As we live in an increasingly magic world, it’s good to remember that there are always horizons — that any sufficiently familiar magic is merely technology — and that there are always new magic just over the horizon, barreling towards us and presenting new mysteries to attempt to resolve.

Listen up, kids. I remember. I was there the day it happened. I know, you’ll say there’s no way I could have been alive back then, but it’s true — the pace of change is faster than you young whippersnappers think, and advances in long-life studies have kept me going far longer than I ever expected.

So yeah, I was around back on the day when it all changed — the day when we learned that TVs outnumbered people in most houses.

Over the last few days, we finally finished watching Scrapped Princess. Coincidentally, a Hugo plug for Spin over at Making Light, a site I always forget to read regularly, reminded me that I had picked it up in hardback when it first came out. So I read that today.